/diy/ - Do It Yourself

A year or two ago I was hunting for knobs in the Mouser catalog (lamenting that nobody ever has the knobs I want) when it hit me "you have a mill and a lathe, you idiot." My overall productivity has been shit ever since.

Progress on spectrometer today: I milled three toggle knobs for the filterpack controls.

>>107949

designing myself from the relevant equations and some random examples.

and I just now realize I misspelled 'spectroradiometer' in the thread title :-P

>>107880

That's more the job of a colorimeter... They don't give you detailed spectral data, they just give relative RGB matches. It's like a spectrometer with only three bands (red green and blue) for visual matches.

The one I'm working on splits the spectrum in 4900 bands from UV through infrared (320 to 1050 nm). So you can use it for color matching (and I plan to), but I'm planning to use it for evaluating light source quality first.

...then I'll go do things like find solar spectral lines, etc :-)

glue on scales with stops...

Position encoders and razor blades in place....

This time I ground the edges of the blades to be slightly blunt so they'd be less fragile.

so... starting on mark II...

>>107760

working on it...

30-400 micrometer slit, looks to be accurate to <2um (looks to be on the low side a bit), no apparent tranversalium at 30um.

The rest of the thing isn't built yet :-) This was taking some effort.

>>107758

A spectroradiometer. Or do you want to know what the spectroradiometer is for?

Adjustable slit from 0 to 1500um... unfortunately the scale is linear and the 30-100 range is the most interesting part.

But what did it in... no stop to keep it going past zero. Apparently you can use a razorblade... to cut another razorblade.

So, we try again... add stops... a nonlinear scale.. and what the hell, add position encoding.

mark I partly assembled before it all went wrong...

this was the mark I before assembly... It had some issues....

Finally got the mark 2 split mechanism finished and calibrated! It works!

Don't laugh at the paint job... pic very much related

>>40334
Oops, that was me.

>>40261

Oh, actually, I did have the world's crappiest drill press. Which brings us to important advice for any DIYers here:

NEVER BUY POWER TOOLS FROM SEARS

Srsly.

>>40260

I didn't have any fancy tools when I made those. They're entirely a hacksaw/dremel/screwdriver/glue job.

>>40241

Took a while to find the old pics. Long running over-fascination with LEDs. This is when the Luxeons were still the biggest badasses in the LED world...

>>40214

Already sort of did that for my wife and me years ago :-)

>>40230

"Doesn't vibrate, has sharp edges... ooh, but it does light up!" And it runs cool, so no internal easy-bake oven!

It can feature in the next /h/ X-ray thread.

>>40217

Naw, just weird genetics. I get it from my dad, my sons are the same way. I bite my nails too, makes it worse (but they're like that even when I don't).

One more to show the rough position. I'm heading down to the workshop to make the magnetic mounts tonight. I haven't quite thought them through as thoroughly as the rest.

They run 12 hours on low (.3W) and about 5 on high (.8W). The batteries charge in two hours.

>>40210

It's a 1928 Singer 28, Singer's 'budget portable' of the time. It only weighed 35lbs and cost half as much as a car as opposed to almost as much as a car. 28s are damn spiffy little machines.